Did Sharpton Bring Down Imus? Some Doubt It

April 13, 2007 — -- As Don Imus tried desperately this week to hold onto his microphone, Rev. Al Sharpton held the megaphone, leading the charge of those who wanted Imus fired. But the extent to which Sharpton was "the public face of this story," as one media observer puts it, has generated a controversy of its own.

Accounts of the storm raging over Imus' future often put Sharpton at the center. A UPI article on Thursday for instance said, "For more than a week, Sharpton managed to refocus the nation's spotlight from Iraq and Afghanistan to Imus."

However, columnist Sylvester Brown, who often writes about race for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, bristles at the credit Sharpton might receive for bringing down Imus.

"Al Sharpton is a convenient diversion from what really happened to Imus," Brown said. "This was so egregious, so over the line, it would have happened anyway, with or without Sharpton."

Sharpton's involvement, along with the involvement of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Brown said, created "an easy excuse for those who didn't want to grapple with the complicated layers of this issue, to just point at Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and say, 'It's their fault.'"

Media critic Susan Douglas, a professor of communications at the University of Michigan, agreed that Sharpton may have gotten more attention than his role merited.

"The public face of this story might look like it was Al Sharpton," she said, and at least for a few days that might have been true, due in large part to Imus' Monday appearance on Sharpton's radio show. But even there, she said it was Imus' own words, not Sharpton, that inflamed the story.

"When he said, 'I can't win with you people,' he was finished," Douglas said.

Others say the Rutgers women's basketball team eclipsed Sharpton as the decisive force in the story when they held a press conference Tuesday.

According to Stephen Metcalf, who writes on the media and popular culture for Slate.com, "Those were powerfully moving voices and images, and once the news cycle got a hold of that, goodnight; [Imus] was as good as gone."